Stephen Fry, the towering, crooked-nosed, Oxford-educated British polymath, may be may things: comedic actor (Blackadder, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, Jeeves and Wooster), accomplished dramatic actor (Wilde, Gosford Park), Game Show Host (QI), author, public intellectual. But theologian? As a humanist and professed atheist, such would be hard to imagine.
But something he said in an interview with David Marchese earlier this month in the New York Times struck me as profoundly correct both philosophically and theologically, cohering with what I used to teach my own undergraduate theology students, much to most of their consternation. In response to Marchese's question, "You said earlier you've been reading philosophy. Is there a particular idea that you're tickled by lately?" Fry responded:
I suppose the real biggie is free will. I find it interesting that no one really talks about it: I would say that 98 percent of all philosophers would agree with me that essentially free will is a myth. It doesn’t exist. That ought to be shocking news on the front of every newspaper. I’m not saying we don’t look both ways before we cross the road; we decide not to leave it to luck as to whether a car is going to hit us. Nor am I saying that we don’t have responsibility for our actions: We have agency over the body in which our minds and consciousness dwell. But we can’t choose our brains, we can’t choose our genes, we can’t choose our parents.
This, as I said above, strikes me as profoundly correct. He makes necessary distinctions so as to be definitionally precise. More strikingly, he uses the same illustration―"we can't choose our parents"―that my famously Calvinistic dad used to use in his theology classes almost 50 years ago.
Most significantly, Fry's evisceration of the foundational, well-nigh subconscious American axiom of the freedom of the will rhymes to the point of mimicry with the argument made by Martin Luther in his 1525 treatise De Servo Arbitrio (On the Bondage of the Will). Luther, whose works fill 61 volumes in the standard Weimar edition, thought so highly of this work that, in a 1537 letter to Wolfgang Capito, said, "You can burn all of my books except for two, The Bondage of the Will and the Small Catechism" (one might add to this list his Commentary on Galatians, a masterpiece of theological contextualization). The point is that of course human beings are not automatons, and that they make real, not merely apparent, choices, in every day matters. But―and here Fry and Luther are in agreement―human choices are constrained by human nature. For Fry, it's the brains and genes we get from our parents. For Luther, humans are likewise constrained by their inheritance. But Luther's focus is derived from his interpretation of the New Testament, mediated at least in part through the grid of the writings of St. Augustine. For Luther, like Augustine, humanity is a massa peccati ("mass of sin") and thus a massa perditionis ("a mass of perdition"); because of this people are incapable of turning away from sin to God. For a human being to be "saved," then, it takes an invincible act of God's grace to change the recalcitrant will, which otherwise would be incapable of cooperation because it is in bondage to sin.
In his treatise, On Rebuke and Grace, chapter 33, written in either 426 or 427, Augustine made a four-fold distinction which remains helpful to this day:
- posse non peccare―Humanity's state prior to the Fall: able not to sin
- non posse non peccare―Humanity's state "in Adam" after the Fall: not able not to sin
- posse peccare, posse non peccare―The church's state "in Christ" while still living in the present world: able to sin, able not to sin
- non posse peccare―The eternal state of the blessed: not able to sin
In each state, of course, people have the capacity to make choices. What differs are the abilities and natures that inform and limit those choices. Thus all people have "free will" in the sense of the power of alternative choice. What is at issue, theologically speaking, is whether or nor people have the power of contrary choice, that is, the power to overcome their natures and make choices contrary to their inherent "bent." Fry, following in the train of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin―though I'm sure unwittingly!―says "no." And, I would maintain, the New Testament confirms this denial.
In the Fourth Gospel (see my posts here and here) Jesus shockingly tells his opponents that their unbelief was due to their not belonging to his sheep (John 10:27). Indeed, earlier in the Gospel Jesus had made the claim that no one is able to come to him unless effectually drawn and given to him by the Father (John 6:43, 65). A generation earlier the Apostle Paul had made an equally clear affirmation of human inability: "The person without the Spirit* does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit (1 Corinthians 2:14, NIV). What is needed is the Spirit's effectual "call" (e.g., Romans 8:29; 1 Corinthians 1:9, 24), for God to "[shine] his light in our hearts to bring the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Corinthians 4:6, trans. JRM). Once he has done this, and the believer has been united to Christ in faith and baptism (Romans 6:1-14), the believer, having once been enslaved to Sin, is now freed from that bondage to be enslaved to God (Romans 6:15-23; cf. my post here). While "Sin" still can, and does, rear its ugly head in "this present evil age" (Galatians 1:4), its definitive power over a believer has been severed; to use Paul's language, the believer has undergone a "death to sin." This "death" and the attendant transfer of ownership/allegiance has necessary ethical consequences. Indeed, Paul argues that this "ability not to sin" must find its expression in what he terms "righteousness" and (progressive) "sanctification" (Romans 6:19), which leads to the "eternal life" (Romans 6:22) and "glorification" which will mark the final state of those "foreknown" by God (Romans 8:29-30).
The point is that what Christians generally refer to as "salvation" is entirely an act of "grace," an unconditioned gift from God.** "Free will" plays no part in it. Augustine, explicitly following Cyprian, was particularly taken by one striking text in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians: "For who differentiates you from anyone else? And what do you have that you have not received? And if indeed you have received it, why then do you boast as if you hadn't" (1 Corinthians 4:7, trans. JRM)?*** Now that's a good question.
*The translation of the Greek term psychikos here is notoriously difficult. The old KJV version famously rendered it "natural," which isn't bad. The NIV's "without the Spirit"―the NRSV's and REB's "unspiritual" is similar, but amenable to unfortunate pietistic misunderstanding―nicely contrasts with the alternative "spiritual person" of verse 15 and the implication at the end of verse 15 that the psychikos person is devoid of the Spirit who would give the needed understanding. The NET Bible's "unbeliever" likewise identifies the individual correctly, but the translation suffers because the point is that the psychikos person, being without the Spirit, cannot believe. Preferable is the exegesis of Anthony Thiselton, who describes the psychikos person as "a person who lives on an entirely human level," in contrast to one who is animated an motivated by the Spirit of God (Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text [NIGTC; Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans/Carlisle: Paternoster, 2000] 267-68).
**See especially John M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2015).
*** Cf. Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints, ch. 7.
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